Analytics applications are used by businesses to analyze their business data and make business decisions based on the data. These applications typically process business data, generate analytics reports, and display results of the analytics reports. Conventional approaches for developing analytics application include building the application from scratch and using templates that can be customized for specific applications. Building applications from scratch typically requires expertise in development of applications and may require significant development time and cost. The approach based on customization of templates also requires knowledge of templates and expertise in customization of templates and may require significant development time and cost.
Some vendors provide prebuilt applications that do not require significant customization for a specific business. However, these applications are tied to a specific source of data as well as a specific structure of data. These applications do not function when used with other sources of data or data that is structurally different from those for which the applications are designed. Accordingly, conventional systems for building analytics applications either require expensive solutions or are inflexible.